This is a column I wrote for the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group newsletter while serving as chair 2017-2019.
On work
Like many of you, I find that competing in the marketplace of ideas can be unpredictable. Themes and methodologies surge, rise and fall in popularity. The process of peer review always has an element of unpredictability despite its worth. The quality of our work has its own inherent element of unpredictability too, as it is often difficult for us to judge its value. More than just a few geographers have seized upon an idea or method and worked toward what we thought would surely be an immediately recognizable breakthrough others would recognize. Unfortunately, these impassioned works of ours are most likely coherent and revolutionary only to ourselves. But that is not to say there is no value in such idiosyncratic work. Indeed, it may not be productive from the standpoint of publication counts and lines on a vita. But the incomprehensibility and failure common to free form intellectualizing is part of the collective process of moving knowledge forward.
Perhaps there should be more institutional room for what we might call hunch-based science or science with fewer rules. There would be more failures, but the net we cast out would be wider. The science of today will be invigorated and often replaced by the science of tomorrow and few of us can see those ideas until they are here. That’s what we need to keep in mind when the certainty required of being a professional academic overshadows any humble appreciation of how much we don’t know. Here are a few recent articles that illustrate how the small and conjectural can be valued amid the seemingly permanent towers of academic practice and always perfect accomplishment.
(1) Vazire, S. 2017. Our obsession with eminence warps research. Nature 547(7661).
(2) Fortin, J. and D.J. Currie. 2013. Big science vs. little science: how scientific impact scales with funding. PloS One 8(6): e65263
Hunch-based research has to get lucky. It doesn't get the same position at the starting line. Most of our research proposals undergo single-blind review, in which reviewers are aware of the author's identity. In a double-blind review, the reviewer does not have this information. Single-blind reviewers are significantly more likely than their double-blind counterparts to recommend for acceptance works from famous authors and top universities. Double-blind reviewing, on the other hand, gets around this problem of prestige. Eminence, the very thing that we are required to cultivate as academics, shapes the processes of inquiry by favoring the well-established rather than the novel and lesser known. The tendency to reward eminence or track record by giving them more weight to funding applications is, as Vazire points out, “… like giving Usain Bolt a 10 meter head start in his next race”. How can the inherent unpredictability of ideas and insights be given more weight?
(3) Fang, F. and A. Casadevall. 2016. Research funding: the case for a modified lottery. MBio 7(2): e00422-16.
(4) Gravem, S. A., S.M. Bachhuber et al. 2017. Transformative research is not easily predicted. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 32(11) 825-834.
Transformative research, despite our certainty that our research is just that, is difficult to predict or anticipate. Transformativity often arises as an after effect of more incremental research and cannot be easily predicted ahead of time. Larger grants do not necessarily lead to larger discoveries, as scientific impact measured in publications is only weakly limited by funding. Lotteries could make research funding awards more equitable given that ranking large numbers of meritorious proposals induces selection bias.
(5) Mountz, A., et al. 2015. For slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4) 1235-1259.
(6) Scheffer, Marten. 2014. The forgotten half of scientific thinking. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(17): 6119-6119.
The degree to which our public academic personas emphasize certainty and closure over working the more productive gray areas is a consequence of the professionalization of the academic class. Rather than researchers ensconced in the thick and tangled woods of ideas, we are expected to signal and advertise certainty and clarity by producing large numbers of publications. We are also expected to embrace the cultivation of a university administrative utopia that reinforces this ideal. Good scholarship, on the other hand, requires more open-ended use of our time. Time to think, reflect, and even fail may not be always be possible, but we need to hold on to that ideal and cultivate it how we can.
